ix

The Storm

Marching west from Béthune, we had nothing to trouble us except our packs and the General, who never exhibited his talent for being in all places at once more terrifically. My own place was alongside my friends C. and R., who, with the prospect of a court-martial, were at first rather quiet, but presently began to be themselves. They rejoiced at least that their equipment was carried on the transport. Mine was not, and every halt was welcome. Our road showed us noble woods, and purling streams turning water-wheels, and cleanly green and white villages. The battalion was billeted at Auchel, a considerable mining town, for one night; I remember that well because, when we got in at eleven or so, the advance party had not completed arrangements, and I set out to find shelter for my servant and myself. Seeing a young woman at an upper window, looking out in some wonder at the sudden incursion in the streets, I addressed her with the most persuasive French I could find, and she (note it, recording Angel, or spirit of Sterne, if you did not then) hastened down to give us food and lodging, and next day piano practice and L’Illustration. On my asking for her address, she prudently gave me her father’s. Emerging from the slag-heaps of Auchel, the battalion moved deviously, but now definitely southward, and came without unusual event and with usual misreading of the map to the flimsy outlandish village of Monchy-Breton (known, of course, as Monkey Britain), near St Pol. The weather had turned heavy and musty, the pre-ordained weather of British operations.

Near this place was an extent of open country (chiefly under wheat) which in its ups and downs and occasional dense woodlands resembled the Somme battlefield; here, therefore, we were trained for several days. The Colonel told us that the ground was held to be an excellent facsimile of the scene of our ‘show.’ Hardly a man knew so much as the name of the southern village from which we were to attack; but from our practice we saw with mixed feelings that the jumping-off position was one side of a valley, the position to be captured the other side, and all began to be proficient in moving to the particular ‘strong point’ or other objective plotted out for them. Gas was loosed over us; we ran out wire at the edge of the swiftly captured woods; we crouched down in trenches while the roaring heat of the flammenwerfer curled up in black smoke above; a Scottish expert, accompanied by well-fed, wool-clad gymnastic demonstrators, preached to us the beauty of the bayonet, though I fear his comic tales of Australians muttering ‘In, out, – on guard,’ and similar invocations of ‘cold steel’ seemed to most of us more disgusting than inspiring in that peacefully ripening farmland. In the intervals we bought chocolate from the village women who had brought their baskets far enough to reach us; and so we passed the time. Our manœuvres and marches were quite hard work, and in the evenings the calm of Monchy-Breton and its mud huts under their heavy verdure, or its crucifixes beside the downland roads, was not much insulted.

At battalion headquarters, where a French soldier, a considerable joker, was on leave, frequent conferences were called over the arrangements for our attack. ‘Jake’ Lintott, the clever assistant-adjutant who had been with the Canadians at Ypres, had drawn a fine bold map of the destined ground and trenches on the reverse of our waterproof table-cloth. When conferences began, the table-cloth was turned over, and the map brought into action. One sunny evening after we had been talking out the problems and proceedings of the coming battle, and making all clear with the map, it was felt that something was wrong, and someone turning noted a face at a window. We hurried out to catch a spy, but missed him, if he was one; certainly he was a stranger.

Nothing else distinguished our Monchy-Breton period; after a fine night or two sleeping under the stars, we left its chicken-runs and muddy little cart-tracks about the middle of August, and were entrained at Ligny St Flochel, between Arras and St Pol. A German aeroplane hovered above the act, and we sat waiting for the train to start, in a familiar attitude, with trying apprehensions. We travelled with the gravity due to hot summer weather, and found the process better than marching. But the Somme was growing nearer! Leaving the railway, we were billeted one night in a village called Le Souich. The occasion was marked at battalion headquarters by a roast goose, which the old farmer whose house we had invaded had shot at shortest range with the air of a mighty hunter (‘Je le tire à l’œil!’) and I joyfully recollect how Millward, that famed cricketer, gave a few of us an hour’s catching practice in the orchard with apples instead of cricket-balls or bombs.

Thence the battalion took the road, in great glare and heat and dust, kilometre after kilometre. The changeful scenery of hills and woods was indeed dramatic and captivating after our long session in the flat country, but as the march wore on most of us were too used up to comment on it. Many men fell out, and officers and non-commissioned officers for the most part were carrying two or three rifles to keep others in their place. At Thièvres there was a long halt, and a demand for water; some thrifty inhabitants produced it at so much a bucket, thus giving occasion for a critical pun on the name of the place. The villagers’ device for dismantling wells and pumps, and their inquisitive probing for information, disturbed our men’s philosophy a little. Eventually the battalion encamped in a solemnly glorious evening at the edge of a great wood called Bois du Warnimont, with the whole divisional artillery alongside – and such was our enthusiasm that we stirred ourselves to take a look at it; the stragglers came in, and were sternly told their fault at ‘orderly room’ next day – we blush to think how many there were, but our experience of marching had recently been meagre.

Warnimont Wood, an unmolested green cloister, was six or seven miles west of the terrible Beaumont Hamel, one of the German masterpieces of concealed strength; but we hardly realized that yet. A reconnoitring party was soon sent up to the line, and I remember thinking (according to previous experience) that I should be able to buy a pencil in the village of Englebelmer, on the way; but when we got there its civilians had all been withdrawn. Therein lay the most conspicuous difference between this district and our old one with the cottagers and débitants continuing their affairs almost in view of the front trench. This country was truly in military hands. The majority of the reconnoitring party went on horseback, I on a bicycle; and the weather had turned rainy, and the quality of Somme mud began to assert itself. My heavy machine went slower and slower, and stopped dead; I was thrown off. The brake was clogged with most tenacious mud, typifying future miseries. Presently we passed a cemetery and reached through wide puddles an empty village called Mesnil, which, although it stood yet in the plausible mask of farmhouses and outbuildings not shattered into heaps, instantly aroused unpleasant suspicions. These suspicions were quickly embodied in the savage rush of heavy shrapnel shells, uncoiling their dingy green masses of smoke downwards while their white-hot darts scoured the acre below. On the west side, a muddy sunken lane with thickets of nettles on one bank and some precarious dugouts in the other led us past the small brick railway station, and we turned out of it by two steps up into a communication trench chopped in discoloured chalk. It smelt ominous, and there was a grey powder here and there thrown by shellbursts, with some of those horrible conical holes in the trench sides, blackened and fused, which meant ‘direct hits,’ and by big stuff. If ever there was a vile, unnerving and desperate place in the battle zone, it was the Mesnil end of Jacob’s Ladder, among the heavy battery positions, and under perfect enemy observation.

Jacob’s Ladder was a long trench, good in parts, stretching from Mesnil with many angles down to Hamel on the River Ancre, requiring flights of stairs at one or two steep places. Leafy bushes and great green and yellow weeds looked into it as it dipped sharply into the green valley by Hamel, and hereabouts the aspect of peace and innocence was as yet prevailing. A cow with a crumpled horn, a harvest cart should have been visible here and there. The trenches ahead were curious, and not so pastoral. Ruined houses with rafters sticking out, with half-sloughed plaster and dangling window-frames, perched on a hillside, bleak and piteous that cloudy morning; half-filled trenches crept along below them by upheaved gardens, telling the story of wild bombardment. Further on was a small chalk cliff, facing the river, with a rambling but remarkable dugout in it called Kentish Caves. The front line was sculptured over this brow, and descended to the wooded marshes of the Ancre in winding and gluey irregularity. Running across it towards the German line went the narrow Beaucourt road, and the railway to Miramount and Bapaume; in the railway bank was a look-out post called the Crow’s Nest, with a large periscope, but no one seemed very pleased to see the periscope. South of the Ancre was broad-backed high ground, and on that a black vapour of smoke and naked tree trunks or charcoal, an apparition which I found was called Thiepval Wood. The Somme indeed!

The foolish persistence of ruins that ought to have fallen but stood grimacing, and the dark day, chilled my spirit. Let us stop this war, and walk along to Beaucourt before the leaves fall. I smell autumn again. The Colonel who was showing Harrison the lie of the land betrayed no such apprehension. He walked about, with indicatory stick, speaking calmly of the night’s shelling, the hard work necessary to keep the trenches open, and the enemy’s advantage of observation, much as if he was showing off his rockery at home; and this confidence fortunately began to grow in me, so that I afterwards regarded the sector as nothing too bad. What my Colonel felt, who knew the battle history of this place, I perceive better to-day, and why he fixed his mind so closely on details. As we went along the slippery chalk cuttings and past large but thin-roofed and mouldy dugouts, it was my duty to detect positions for forward dumps of bombs, ammunition, water and many other needs, against the approaching battle. I was pleasantly helped by Captain Kirk, the most reticent of men; some time later we heard that he crossed No Man’s Land, and fought several Germans in a dugout, the light of which had attracted his notice. However, he now seemed afraid of even me. When we had made our round, we went back across the village to the Cheshire Colonel’s exemplary underground headquarters in Pottage Trench, a clean and quiet little alley near some pretty villas which might have been at Golder’s Green, under the whispering shadow of aspen trees in a row, with a model firing-rack of SOS rockets; and thence, not unwillingly, back farther, up Jacob’s Ladder to Mesnil, which now smelt stronger still of high explosive, and away.

The battalion moved forward to a straggling wood called from its map reference P. 18, near the little town of Mailly-Maillet. Here, three miles from the enemy’s guns, it was thought sufficient to billet us in tents (and those, to round off my posthumous discontent, used specimens). Mailly-Maillet was reported to have been until recently a delightful and flourishing little place, but it was in the sere and yellow; its long château wall had been broken down by the fall of shell-struck trees; its church, piously protected against shrapnel by straw mats, had been hit. On the road to the town, we had spelt out on almost every cornfield gate the advertisement of ‘Druon-Lagniez, Quincaillier à Mailly-Maillet’; but, seeking out his celebrated shop, one found it already strangely ventilated, and its dingy remnants of cheap watches or brass fittings on the floor disappointing after all the proclamation. In a garden solitude of this little town there rose a small domed building, as yet but a trifle disfigured, with plaster and glass shaken down to the mosaic floor, in the middle of which stood the marble tomb of a great lady, a princess, if I do not forget, of a better century. There the pigeons fluttered and alighted; and the light through the high pale-tinted panes seemed to rest with inviolable grace on holy ground.

Work at Hamel immediately called for me, with a party of good trench hands, duly paraded and commanded by my invincible friend Sergeant Worley. The first night that we reached the village, wild with warfare, rain was splashing down, and we willingly waited for dawn in a sepulchral cellar, wet through, yet not anxious on that account. I had already chosen the nooks and corners in the front line where I would make up in readiness for our battle small reserves of rations, rifle ammunition, grenades, reels of barbed wire, planks, screw pickets, wire netting, sandbags; my party therefore took up their burdens from the central stores in Hamel, and followed me to the different points. The chief dump in Hamel lay between a new but not weather-proof residence (its back door opened on Thiepval), and a tall hedge with brambles straying over our stacks of planks and boxes, making a scene passably like the country builder’s yard. A soldiers’ cemetery was open at all hours just behind this kind illusion. I may say that we worked hard, up and down, and even felt a little proud as the forward stores grew to useful size. When the Brigade bombing officer, suddenly pouncing upon me in a lonely trench, told me that my boxes of bombs, painfully stacked at that place, would all be ruined by exposure to the weather, and that he should report me to the General, I damned him and wept. My critic (an old adversary) had just arrived from England. But I was afraid of the General. Apart from that, there was no great trouble; once, carelessly pushing some bomb-boxes above the parados in sight of some enemy post, we returned with the next consignment to find nothing but new shell-holes there. All day long that valley was echoing with bombardment, but for the most part it was on Thiepval Wood that the fury thundered; and we, at meal-times, sat freely like navvies in some ruin and put away considerable quantities of bread, bully and cheese. And how well we knew our Hamel! The ‘Café du Centre’ was as real to us as the Ritz or the ‘Marquis of Granby,’ though now it was only some leaning walls obviously of cheap plaster and a silly signboard. The insurance agent’s house, with its gold bee sign still inviting custom (not in our line!); the stuffed pheasant by his glass dome, drooping a melancholy beak and dishonoured plumage, opposite our duckboard and wire repository; the superior hip bath lying on the roadside towards the line; the spring of beautiful clear drink there; the level-crossing keeper’s red house, with its cellars full of petrol-tins of water, in the direction of Thiepval – these and every other lineament of poor Hamel photographed themselves in us. The ridiculously fat tom-cat which had refused to run wild knew us well. We humped our boxes of deadly metal past the agricultural exhibition of innocent metal on the wayside; what were ploughs and drags and harrows to Hamel now? What rural economist had collected them there?

The date of the attack was suddenly postponed. A runner discovered me, with this news. We went back to the wood in which the battalion, not too well pleased with its surroundings, had dug short protective lengths of trench. These, however, could not protect us from a plague of wasps, and the engineers had to add to their varied service that of cleaning some monstrous nests with gun-cotton. After an agreeable evening passed in exploring the rambling streets of Mailly, and watching a huge howitzer in action in the orchards, fed with shells by means of a pulley, and those shells large enough to be seen plainly mounting up to the sky before they disappeared in an annihilating dive upon ‘Thiepval Crucifix,’ we turned in. I was as bold as Harrison and others, and put on my pyjamas; but at midnight the shriek of shells began, meant for our camp, and we slipped shivering into the nearest slit of trench. There were gas shells, and high explosive, and samples of both missed our trench by yards; the doctor, who was huddling next to me with his monkey in his arms, was suddenly affected by the gas, and his pet also swallowed some. They were both ‘sent down the line’; but I was unharmed. When the hate was over, it seemed perhaps difficult to sleep again, warm as the blankets might be, and it was one more case of waiting for daylight.

Corporal Candler, without whom our administration would have been so much poorer from 1916 to 1918, will perhaps forgive me for telling a story of Mailly Wood for him. Perhaps it was on the occasion just mentioned that he happened to be sitting alone in the orderly-room tent, running his hands through his hair over the latest heap of orders and messages. When shelling began, he hesitated to go out to the trench; and as he sat there, he saw a man wearing a black cloak appear in the doorway. This figure stood watching him. ‘Don’t be funny,’ said Candler, adjusting his glasses – we see and hear him exactly. The figure still paused, then went; and Candler went after, among the trees, but no explanation could be got.

Expecting that I should not again see that wood, I went up next night with some heavy materials for the dump in Hamel, carried on the limbers. The transport officer, Maycock, was with us, which is saying we talked all the way. At Mesnil church, a cracked and toppling obelisk, there were great craters in the road, and when one of the limbers fell in, it was necessary to unload it before it could be got out. While this delay lasted, in such a deadly place, my flesh crept, but luck was ours, and no fresh shells came over to that church before we were away. One still sees in rapid gunlights the surviving blue finger-post at the fork in the unknown road. It helped us. As we plodded down the dark hill, the blackness over by Thiepval Wood leapt alive with tossing flares, which made it seem a monstrous height, and with echo after echo in stammering mad pursuit the guns threshed that area; uncounted shells passed over with savage whipcracks, and travelled meteor-like with lines of flame through the brooding sultry air. One scarcely seemed to be alive and touching earth, but at the bottom of the hill, which was steep enough, the voices of other beings sounded, at Hamel Dump, like business – ‘Back in ’ere, lad,’ ‘Any more?’ The following day I had an opportunity to improve the contents of my small forward dumps, and to choose with Sergeant Rhodes, the master-cook, a ‘retired spot’ where he might prepare the rum and coffee, to be served to the attacking troops. This quest introduced an incident. All day, on and off, our guns were battering the German trenches, and one saw almost without a thought our salvoes bursting every few minutes on such tender points as trench junctions, whitely embossed in that sector of chalk parapets and downlands. The German guns answered this brilliant provocation at their own moment. Thus, as the thin and long cook-sergeant and I were walking comfortably in Roberts’ Trench, the air about us suddenly became ferocious with whizzbangs, the parapets before and behind sprang up or collapsed in clods and roarings; there seemed no way out. They were hitting the trench. Rhodes stared at me, I at him for a suggestion; his lean face presented the wildest despair, and no doubt mine was the same; we ran, we slipped and crouched one way and the other but it was like a cataract both ways. And then, sudden quiet; more to come? Nothing; a reprieve.

Another postponement took me dustily back to the battalion in the wood watched by so many German observation-balloons in the morning sun. The wood, shelled deliberately because of its camps and accidentally because of some conspicuous horse-lines, and silhouetted movements on the hill to the west, had frayed the men’s keenness; there had been casualties; and then the anti-climax twice repeated had spoiled their first energetic eagerness for a battle. Yet, still, they were a sound and capable battalion, deserving far better treatment than they were now getting, and a battle, not a massacre. On the evening of September 2, the battalion moved cautiously from Mailly-Maillet by cross-battalion tracks, through pretty Englebelmer, with ghostly Angelus on the green and dewy light, over the downs to Mesnil, and assembled in the Hamel trenches to attack the Beaucourt ridge next morning. The night all round was drugged and quiet. I stood at the junction of four advanced trenches, directing the several companies into them as had been planned. Not one man in thirty had seen the line by daylight – and it was a maze even when seen so, map in hand. Even climbing out of the narrow steep trenches with weighty equipment, and crossing others by bridges placed ‘near enough’ in this dark last moment, threatened to disorder the assault. Every man remembered the practice attacks at Monchy-Breton, and was ready, if conditions were equal, to act his part; among other things, the ‘waves’ had to form up and carry out a ‘right incline’ in No Man’s Land – a change of direction almost impossible in the dusk, in broken and entangled ground, and under concentrated gunfire. When the rum and coffee was duly on the way to these men, I went off to my other duty. A carrying-party from another battalion was to meet me in Hamel, and for a time the officer and I, having nothing to do but wait, sat in a trench beside the village high street considering the stars in their courses. An unusual yet known voice jubilantly interrupted this unnaturally calm conversation; it was a sergeant-major, a fine soldier who had lost his rank for drunkenness, won it again, and was now going over in charge of a party carrying trench mortar ammunition. A merry man, a strong man; when we had met before, he had gained my friendliest feelings by his freedom from any feeling against a schoolboy officer. Some NCO’s took care to let their superior training and general wisdom weigh on my shyness: not so C. He referred to the attack as one might speak of catching a train, and in it a few hours later he showed such wonderful Saint Christopher spirit that he was expected to be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Meanwhile all waited.

The cold disturbing air and the scent of the river mist marked the approach of the morning. I got my fellow-officer to move his men nearer to my main supply of bombs, which were ready in canvas buckets; and time slipped by, until scarcely five preliminary minutes remained. My friend then took his men into cellars not far away, there to shelter while the cannonade opened; for their orders were to carry bombs to our bombing officer, young French, whose orders were to clear the suspected German dugouts under the railway bank, a short time after the attacking waves had crossed. As for me, I took off my equipment and began to set out the bomb buckets in a side trench so that the carriers could at the right moment pick them up two at a time; and while I was doing this, and the east began to unveil, a stranger in a soft cap and a trench coat approached, and asked me the way to the German lines. This visitor facing the east was white-faced as a ghost, and I liked neither his soft cap nor the mackintosh nor the right hand concealed under his coat. I, too, felt myself grow pale, and I thought it as well to direct him down the communication trench, Devial Alley, at that juncture deserted; he scanned me, deliberately, and quickly went on. Who he was, I have never explained to myself; but in two minutes the barrage was due, and his chances of doing us harm (I thought he must be a spy) were all gone.

The British barrage struck. The air gushed in hot surges along that river valley, and uproar never imagined by me swung from ridge to ridge. The east was scarlet with dawn and the flickering gunflashes; I thanked God I was not in the assault, and joined the subdued carriers nervously lighting cigarettes in one of the cellars, sitting there on the steps, studying my watch. The ruins of Hamel were soon crashing chaotically with German shells, and jags of iron and broken wood and brick whizzed past the cellar mouth. When I gave the word to move, it was obeyed with no pretence of enthusiasm. I was forced to shout and swear, and the carrying party, some with shoulders hunched, as if in a snowstorm, dully picked up their bomb buckets and went ahead. The wreckage around seemed leaping with flame. Never had we smelt high explosive so thick and foul, and there was no distinguishing one shell-burst from another, save by the black or tawny smoke that suddenly shaped in the general miasma. We walked along the river road, passed the sandbag dressing-station that had been rigged up only a night or two earlier where the front line (‘Shankill Terrace’) crossed the road, and had already been battered in; we entered No Man’s Land, past the trifling British wire on its knife-rests, but we could make very little sense of ourselves or the battle. There were wounded Black Watch trailing down the road. They had been wading the marshes of the Ancre, trying to take a machine-gun post called Summer House. A few yards ahead, on the rising ground, the German front line could not be clearly seen, the water-mist and the smoke veiling it; and this was lucky for the carrying party. Half-way between the trenches, I wished them good-luck, and pointing out the place where they should, according to plan, hand over the bombs, I left them in charge of their own officer, returning myself, as my orders were, to my Colonel. I passed good men of ours, in our front line, staring like persons in a trance across No Man’s Land, their powers of action apparently suspended.

‘What’s happening over there?’ asked Harrison, with a face all doubt and stress, when I crawled into the candled, overcrowded frowsiness of Kentish Caves. I could not say, and sat down ineffectively on some baskets, in which were the signallers’ sacred pigeons. ‘What’s happening the other side of the river?’ All was in ominous discommunication. A runner called Gosden presently came in, with bleeding breast, bearing a message written an hour or more earlier. Unsted, my former companion and instructor in Festubert’s cool wars, appeared, his exemplary bearing for once disturbed; he spoke breathlessly and as in an agony. This did not promise well, and, as the hours passed, all that could be made out was that our attacking companies were ‘hanging on,’ some of them in the German third trench, where they could not at all be reached by the others, dug in between the first and the second. Lintott wrote message after message, trying to share information north, east and west. South was impossible; the marsh separated us from that flank’s attack. Harrison, the sweat standing on his forehead, thought out what to do in this deadlock, and repeatedly telephoned to the guns and the General. Wounded men and messengers began to crowd the scanty passages of the Caves, and curt roars of explosion just outside announced that these dugouts, shared by ourselves and the Black Watch, were now to be dealt with. Death soon arrived there, among the group at the clumsy entrance. Harrison meanwhile called for his runner, fastened the chin-strap of his steel helmet, and pushed his way out into the top trenches to see what he could; returned presently mopping his forehead, with that kind of severe laugh which tells the tale of a man who has incredibly escaped from the barrage. The day was hot outside, glaring mercilessly upon the stropped, burned, choked chalk trenches. I came in again to the squeaking field telephones and obscure candlelight. Presently Harrison, a message in his hand, said: ‘Rabbit, they’re short of ammunition. Get round and collect all the fellows you can and take them over – and stay over there and do what you can.’ I felt my heart thud at this; went out, naming my men among headquarters’ ‘odds and ends’ whenever I could find them squatted under the chalk-banks, noting with pleasure that my nearest dump had not been blown up and would answer our requirements; we served out bombs and ammunition, then I thrust my head in again to report that I was starting, when he delayed, and at length cancelled, the enterprise. The shells on our breathless neighbourhood seemed to fall more thickly, and the dreadful spirit of waste and impotence sank into us, when a sudden telephone call from an artillery observer warned us that there were Germans in our front trench. In that case Kentish Caves was a death-trap, a hole in which bombs would be bursting within a moment; yet here at last was something definite, and we all seemed to come to life, and prepared with our revolvers to try our luck.

The artillery observer must have made some mistake. Time passed without bombs among us or other surprise, and the collapse of the attack was wearily obvious. The bronze noon was more quiet but not less deadly than the morning. I went round the scarcely passable hillside trenches, but they were amazingly lonely: suddenly a sergeant-major and half a dozen men bounded superhumanly, gasping and excited, over the parapets. They had been lying in No Man’s Land, and at last had decided to ‘chance their arm’ and dodge the machine-guns which had been perseveringly trying to get them. They drank pints of water, of which I had luckily a little store in a dugout there, now wrecked and gaping. I left them sitting wordless in that store. The singular part of the battle was that no one, not even these, could say what had happened, or what was happening. One vaguely understood that the waves had found their manœuvre in No Man’s Land too complicated; that the Germans’ supposed derelict forward trench near the railway was joined by tunnels to their main defence, and enabled them to come up behind our men’s backs; that they had used the bayonet where challenged, with the boldest readiness; ‘used the whole dam’ lot, minnies, snipers, rifle-grenades, artillery’; that machine-guns from the Thiepval ridge south of the river were flaying all the crossings of No Man’s Land. ‘Don’t seem as if the 49th Div. got any farther.’ But the general effect was the disappearance of the attack into mystery.

Orders for withdrawal were sent out to our little groups in the German lines towards the end of the afternoon. How the runners got there, they alone could explain, if any survived. The remaining few of the battalion in our own positions were collected in the trench along Hamel village street, and a sad gathering it was. Some who had been in the waves contrived to rejoin us now. How much more fortunate we seemed than those who were still in the German labyrinth awaiting the cover of darkness for their small chance of life! And yet, as we filed out, up Jacob’s Ladder, we were warned by low-bursting shrapnel not to anticipate. Mesnil was its vile self, but we passed at length. Not much was said, then or afterwards, about those who would never again pass that hated target; among the killed were my old company commanders Penruddock and Northcote (after a great display of coolness and endurance in the German third line) – laughing French, quiet Hood and a hundred more. The Cheshires took over the front line, which the enemy might at one moment have occupied without difficulty; but neither they nor our own patrols succeeded in bringing in more than two or three of the wounded; and, the weather turning damp, the Germans increased their difficulty in the darkness and distorted battlefield with a rain of gas shells.